The winning entry by Yosuke Fujiki is a catalogue of houses with inthinkable shortcomings. Fujiki states that this will allow us to develop new life styles and reconsider the preoccupations we have when it comes to living. According to Koolhaas, 'the first prize represents a 'brain' with a better understanding of the issue than the person who set it'.
Published in: Yasuhiro Teramatsu (red, 1993) The Japan Architect 1992 Annual. Shinkenchiku-Sha, Tokyo.
About the results
– Rem Koolhaas
Working through 732 entries is both sad and exhilarating. Sad, because this profession is so desperate for exposure/recognition that, at the slightest provocation, it produces stupendous quantities of work, representing enormous investment of energy, ingenuity, money... Sad, also because in spite (or maybe because) of good intentions, the majority does not have a clue; there is an overwhelming addiction to form, style, aesthetics, that in itself really represents a disease.
But it was also exhilarating because some of the entries were really amazingly good. In them there was serious research about how style could be shed, how the narcissistic automatism of form-making could be interrupted, how new explorations of content could be injected into an exhausted profession.
Another source of great interest is the hidden, subconscious themes that such a mass of projects appears to contain: there still seems to be an increasingly secret–anti-ecological–romance with mobility, with the car. Maybe 20% of all entries started by removing the house from the city–and all its politically correct preoccupations–and settled near a highway, building some kind of nomadic shed near or over the car, acts of quiet rebellion that will probably never be registered anywhere except
in this great pile.
Another, more innocent (and irritating) reflex was to start with a cube. As if this form has not always been one of the heavy weights on the scene of architectural history. I'm bored by its whole history with mystery, mysticism, political charge (fascist, communist, you name it...). You have to be deeply sophisticated or even more deeply ignorant to be able to turn such a 'serious' object of history to your advantage... Most of these projects were not style-less but thought-less.
Anyway, let me talk about the 3 winners.
[...] I was really happy that the first prize was there. Without it, the whole competition would have been slightly sterile: the first prize represents a 'brain' with a better understanding of the issue than the person who set it. It 'made' the theme and the competition.
It is, beyond the wildest dreams of Mies, a demonstration of his famous 'less is more ' . The systematic suppression of elements triggers spectacular, panoramas of use, uselessness, of unpredictable categories. It recharges 'what we have' and at the same time destabilises the entire notion of the house in an absolute anti-aesthetic way. And at the same time, the entire chart is, of course, the aesthetic experience of intelligence at work.
Brilliant...
First Place
– Yosuke Fujiki
I think we have some preconceptions about using a house. For example, we used to have popular notions that a door is to be opened and that water should run from a shower in a house.
But, if our ordinary houses have some defects–for example, if there are no gas pipes and waterworks in a kitchen, or if a house has no roof–we will not be able to use our houses in the way we have used them till now. We will then have to make our life styles suit these houses.
Now, this diagram draws plans for 100 defective houses. So to speak, this is the house catalogue that helps us to make original life styles.
Why don't you try to make a random choice from these plans and roform your house to suit one plan? In these challenges, I expect that you will get interesting ideas about life styles that free us from fixed ideas of housing.
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